Hi. I come from a design background, and the field of Interaction Design
in India (small though it is) is full of product and visual design
professionals who crossed over some time during the past 15 years and
are largely self-taught.

Personally, I taught my first course on user interface design back in
1994, and have been a teaching Interaction Design professionally since
1998 in a design school.

When I teach a course on HCI / Interaction Design / Usability, I sorely
miss teachers / courses from the backgrounds of cognitive psychology,
instructional design and written communication.

If a web form is necessarily long and screen real estate determines that
scrolling is necessary, would you include controls at the top *and* bottom
of the form for all stages of a linear ordering process?

Dear all,
I would like to hear about your thoughts how much the field of
user-interface design and interaction design related to "Ergonomics."
And how much we can learn from "Ergonomics" about the interaction design?
Then, why?

This, I have been thinking of for long time.
Looking back in 1990s, I learnt the user-interface design partially
applying the discipline of human factors study in a university, and I
realize there are any thing I can take from the field of Ergonomics.
Nowadays, Ergonomics people think everybody have to come to them to ask
about user-interface and us

On the 24th of December 2003, I ordered the Magnetic Elements toolkit fromwww.magments.com. As you may remember, I hadn't received the toolkit or
received a response to emails sent to the addresses on the website.

Though PayPal indicated that they would not intervene to resolve the
missing toolkit because 30 days had elapsed since purchase, they did
forward my complaint on to Benjamin Speaks, who receives the payments made
on PayPal.

>> "Software engineers live in their own world. With few exceptions,>> they only focus on computers and themselves. A problem is seen>> as solved as soon as the algorithm is correct and the compiler> >does not come back with any syntax errors.">> That might be how it's done in undergraduate programming classes.

"Thumbnails will replace generic-looking document icons, providing users with visual cues as to the nature of the material inside a container. Their appearance will go beyond today's thumbnails to reflect the amount of material they contain." [p. 196]

This is exactly what I like to do for OpenOffice.org/StarOffice thumbnails representing documents.

'cause this is my fist mail to this group I like to say "hello" to all interaction designers and architects. In addition to this 5 letters, let me point you to a short paper I wrote for Interact 2003 in Zurich. Title is "Mind the Gap! Software Engineers and Interaction Architects"

For those of you using Mac OS X and are a little less than satisfied with
the Dock for whatever reason, you might want to check out the utility known
as "DragThing" by James Thomson.http://www.dragthing.com/english/about.html